Dating Without Novocaine (4 page)

“What types of strange things?”

“Oh, like maybe I've chosen five books at random from the fiction shelves at the library, and when I take them home and read them I discover that they all have a villain who looks and acts like Teddy Roosevelt.”

“What on earth could you possibly learn from that?”

“It's like the cards. You can find the parallel in your own life, if you look for it. Maybe I'm dating a guy who reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt in some way, and the synchronicity is telling me that he is bad for me, that he's a villain. I don't know. It depends.”

“Cassie, sometimes you're a very weird chick, you know that?”

“Am I?” she asked, sounding pleased.

“Definitely.”

Louise got up and went to the refrigerator, returning with a two-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi. She refilled our glasses. “Have you outlined a plan of attack for finding Mr. One-in-a-Million?” she asked, capping the bottle
and setting it on the coffee table, then sinking cross-legged onto the carpet.

“Somewhat.” I told her about the events I'd found in the papers, and asked if she'd want to go to the free concert in Pioneer Courthouse Square.

“Jazz? I don't know,” Louise said. “Maybe Cass will go with you.”

“No way,” Cassie said. “Guys who like jazz take themselves way too seriously.”

“Or you might be able to get Scott to go,” Louise said.

“What would be the point of going to a concert to meet guys, if I'm with a guy already? No one would approach me.”

“Oh. That's right.”

“Maybe I'll just do the gorge hike. Even if I did find a single guy at the jazz concert, he'd probably make me a tape of his favorite music, and then be all disappointed when I didn't like it.”

“They're so cute when they try to share,” Cassie said.

“I was also thinking of trying Internet dating. It seems like an efficient way to look for what you want. Sort of like shopping.”

Louise made a face. “Are you sure about that? It's kind of dangerous, isn't it?”

“I shouldn't think it was any more so than meeting someone at a dance club.”

“But people can lie when they're hidden behind their computers,” Louise said.

“They can lie in real life, too. I've looked at a couple of the sites, and they seem pretty safe. You get a code
name, and they give you a mailbox on the site, so no one has your real e-mail address.”

“I don't know, Hannah, you hear all sorts of stories…”

“You hear good stories, too.” I lowered my voice to a confidential, persuasive level. “Aren't you even a little bit curious about it? There might be a college professor or an artist on there right now, just the type you're looking for.”

“You don't want
me
to try it, do you?” she asked.

“Why not? We all could, you, me, Cassie and Scott. You'd do it, wouldn't you, Cassie?”

“Yeah, sure, for a lark. Why not? I see plenty that goes on at the pub, and I wouldn't mind having a computer screen between me and some of the snakes out there while I'm looking for a date.”

“Some of the sites are free,” I continued, “and others give you a trial membership. Think of how many ‘possibles' we could sort through, from the comfort of our own homes! And if they're all weirdos, we don't have to meet any of them in person.”

“I don't know…”

“Come on, it'll be fun.”

“If you can get Scott to do it, too, then maybe I will.” She sounded far more reluctant than enthusiastic.

I grinned, victory within my grasp. “This is going to be great.”

“Is it?” Louise asked weakly, and reached for the bottle of Diet Pepsi.

“It'll be an adventure!”

“Wonderful.”

“H
ey, Hannah, you should have stopped by my office today,” Scott said, closing our front door behind him. It was three days after our dinner at the restaurant. “This woman came in with an abscess under one of her molars. The infection went all the way down into the jaw, where it had eaten out a pocket of bone—”

“Oh, God, Scott, shut up!” I said, covering my ears and ducking my head toward my lap in an effort to shut out the image he was conjuring.

“I had to drill through her tooth, and when I did, this spurt of pus—”

“I'm going to throw up.”

“And the smell—”

“Stop it!”

“I second that,” Cassie said. “That is beyond gross. Jeez, Scott, you've been sucking ether too long if you think that makes interesting conversation.”

“We don't use ether. That went out in the fifties.”

“You get my point.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “It's safe, Hannah. The beast has been silenced.”

I glared at Scott, then spun ninety degrees in my desk
chair and stood, going to snatch the grocery bag out of Scott's hands. “What's in here?” I asked.

“Greedy thing, aren't you?”

“You went to Zupan's? We'll have to get out the linen tablecloth.” Zupan's was the aesthetically pleasing grocery store a few blocks down from our house. Cassie and I usually shopped at Safeway, assuming that any supermarket as attractive as Zupan's must be beyond our means.

“That's me, Dr. Deep Pockets. I picked up some things to make this torture more endurable.”

I dug through the bag. Purple grapes, store-made brownies, red wine and Tater Tots. I pulled out the bag of frozen potato product and held it up, making a questioning face.

“Don't you like Tater Tots?” Scott asked.

“Don't they remind you of school lunches from grade school?”

“If you don't want any, it's more for me.”

Cassie took the bag from my hand and carried it into the kitchen. I heard banging as she dug out our one cookie sheet.

“Did you get the photos scanned?” I asked.

“I e-mailed them to you,” he said, flopping down onto the lumpy futon with its stained blue-canvas cover. He looked perfectly at home. Our nasty beige shag carpeting never kept him from sitting on the floor, either, and it didn't seem to bother him that half our glasses were jelly jars.

I would say that was because he was a guy, but I'd seen his place, a condominium on a bluff overlooking NW Portland, and I knew better. His taste went toward
black leather furniture and lots of stereo equipment, and he had recently purchased a mission-style cherrywood dining table.

Of course, all his furniture was buried under dirty clothes, magazines, dishes, and the unnamed effluvia of male existence, but the finer things were there, underneath. He'd once explained that he had to be so clean all day at work, he couldn't stand to extend the effort to his home.

That was dentists for you. Bunch of weird-os.

Louise showed up, her dark brown hair flying in wild curls around her head, tossed by the wind. The touch of pink in her cheeks made me realize anew how pretty she was, and my eyes went to Scott, wondering if he ever regretted that things had not worked out between them.

He seemed more interested in snooping through our bookshelf. I wondered whether he'd mention the guide to tantric sex that Cassie had recently added.

“Hannah, I think I got another client for you,” Louise said.

“Oh?”

“Derek, at work. He's lost a bunch of weight and needs some suits altered. I gave him your card.”

“Is he the one who just got divorced?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, and the corner of her mouth crooked in a smile.

I raised my eyebrows. Scott stopped browsing the bookshelf, and Cassie appeared from the kitchen doorway, plate of Tater Tots in hand.

“What?” Louise asked.

“You tell me,” I said.

“What? About Derek?”

“Don't say you're going for a guy who just got divorced,” Scott said.

“I'm not! Who said I was? I'm not interested. He has two teenage kids, you know. He's too old for me.” She smiled like a naughty child. “Looks pretty good since he lost that weight, though. Oh, I'm just kidding,” she said before any of us could say anything. “You think I'm stupid? I have a degree in this crap, I know what not to do.”

Cassie put the plate of Tater Tots down on the coffee table. “You're the one who told us that counselors were the most screwed up bunch of people on the face of the planet, and not worth dating.”

“That's true enough.”

I went over to the computer and woke it from sleep mode as Louise shed her coat and Cassie poured her a jelly jar of red wine. Scott went to work on the Tater Tots, squirting ketchup in a big puddle, and Cassie sat lotus-style and straight-backed on the floor and picked up a brownie. No one had touched the grapes, perhaps because they were fresh and unprocessed and therefore good for one. I tore off a small bunch and took them with me back to the computer desk, a few feet from the coffee table, just so they wouldn't look scorned.

“I don't have to write my own ad, do I?” Scott asked as I connected to the Internet. “You three should write it for me. You know what women want.”

I peered at him over my shoulder. “The idea here is to find your one-in-a-million match, not to score as many babes as you can.”

“That sucks. Maybe I'm not ready for my one-in-a-million.”

“Yes you are,” Louise said. “You've been messing around long enough.”

“No I haven't. I just got the BMW six months ago. I need to cruise! I need to impress chicks with my wheels!”

“What are you, sixteen?” I asked.

“I need to put the top down and leer at women on the sidewalks. I need to have hot tub parties.”

“You don't have a hot tub,” I said.

“And your car is not a convertible,” Louise said. “And this is Portland. Who has a convertible? It rains too much.”

“Don't spoil my fun.”

“Don't you ever wonder what germs might live in hot tub water?” I asked as I logged onto the personals site I had chosen for our group experiment. “You think of hot tubs at apartment complexes, and what scungy people might get in there nude, oozing fluids left and right. And then it just stays there, bubbling. Don't bacteria multiply in the heat?”

“Hannah, yuck,” Cassie said. “I was going to go to Carson Hot Springs next weekend, too.”

“Half a cup of Clorox might help,” Scott said.

Cassie grimaced. “That's just what I want, to breathe in steaming bleach. That is not why one goes to natural springs.”

“It's probably hot enough you don't really have to worry about anything,” he said, and popped a Tot into his mouth.

“Okay, here we are,” I said. “Who wants to go first?”

Louise came to stand behind me. “Let's look at some of the ads before we begin.”

“Men or women?”

“Guys. I've got to see if there's anyone even worth bothering about.”

I clicked my way to the search page, and filled out the obvious criteria of age range and marital status. “We can search by words in the ads, too.”

“‘Vegetarian,'” Cassie said.

“No!” Louise and I said in unison. “No vegetarians,” I said.

“Why not?”

“They're high-maintenance eaters,” I said.

“Thanks a lot.”

“Oh, Cass, you're fine, you don't make a fuss. But for dating—I don't want some guy taking me to organic restaurants. And how could I bring a vegetarian home to Mom and Dad?”

Scott paused in his Tater consumption. “They'll only let you marry a carnivore?”

“Omnivore. It would just be too embarrassing. Can you see it? ‘Sorry, Dad, Jeremy won't be eating any barbecued spare ribs. Could you grill this soy burger for him?' I'd never hear the end of it.”

Cassie was still looking pouty. “I don't see why you should be embarrassed for someone else's eating habits. If he's fine with it, you should be, too.”

“I'm too immature to separate my identity from my date's,” I said.

“As if maturity had anything to do with it,” Louise said. “None of us can do that. I certainly can't.”

“That's a chick thing,” Scott said. “Guys don't care what a girl eats, or what others might think of her taste in clothes, or anything like that.”

“Bullshit,” Louise said.

“Louise!” I said, rounding my lips in fake horror at her language.

“We don't!” Scott insisted.

“What a load of crap,” Louise said. “You guys care, you just choose different criteria.”

“We do not.”

Louise nodded her head, bouncing it up and down like a street fighter getting ready to brawl, her jaw thrust forward. “You want your date to have big breasts and long hair. You want her to have a nice butt that other guys will stare at.”

“Hey, that's got nothing to do with image.”

“Sure it does,” I said, catching Louise's thought. “The better-looking your girlfriend, the more of a ‘man' you appear. You could look like a dead possum yourself, but if you had a beautiful woman on your arm other guys would assume you were something special. Even other women would assume it. They'd think you were rich. Either that, or…”

“Or what?”

“Never mind.”

“Or
what,
Hannah?”

“You know.” I cast a quick glance at his crotch.

Louise affected a Texas drawl. “They'd think that was a mighty fine cut of swinging sirloin you had between them thar legs.”

“Of course, I wouldn't know anything about that type of thing,” Cassie said, “being a vegetarian.”

I spoke primly. “Some girls eat meat, some don't.”

Scott gaped at us. “And they say guys are bad. You three are worse than any group of men.”

“Oh, we are not,” Louise said, swishing her hand dismissively.

“My privates are not up for discussion.”

“You were the one who insisted,” I said. “And why is it always referred to as a meat product? Sausage, salami, meat, sirloin, and having sex is ‘porking.'”

“Because you women are the ones who spend all your time discussing it. In centuries past you were all in the kitchen. With the meat.”

“Yep, that's where we were. Toiling with the meat,” I said, and giggled, and saw Cassie and Louise bury their noses in their jelly jars. “But bread would have done as well. ‘My man's got a fine loaf.' I could see that. ‘I was up kneading it all night.'”

“It wouldn't rise,” Louise said. “I put it in a warm place, but nothing happened.”

“Maybe my yeast wasn't fresh,” I said.

Cassie groaned. “Yeast. Oh, gross.”

“I know, I'm terrible.”

“You're as bad as Scott,” Louise said.

He spoke around the last of the Tater Tots. “Hey, I contributed nothing to this line of discussion.”

“You're guilty by association,” Louise said. “You two should write a horror novel together. You could sit for hours thinking up revolting images.”

“Only if the monster was a dentist,” I said.

“He could never fit his hairy paws into his patients'
mouths,” Scott said. “He could carry off an ornery seamstress, though.”

“Yeah, right,” I said, and turned back to the computer, suddenly feeling awkward and wanting to change the subject. “We're never going to get anything done at this rate.”

Sometimes I got the littlest bit flustered around Scott. I knew he wasn't flirting with me, I knew that, yet when a cute guy makes a comment about carrying you off, you start wondering things you have no business wondering about your best friend's ex-boyfriend.

“Put in ‘cooking,'” Louise said.

“Okay.” I hit Search, and a few seconds later a list of names came up, some with a small camera beside them to denote a photo. “Here we go.” I clicked on the first name with a picture as Scott and Cassie joined us at the computer.

A blank square came up, then the picture started to fill in, top to bottom.

“A tree, so far so good,” Scott said.

The top of a head appeared, dark-haired, then a forehead. A face, long and narrow. Neck. Shoulders.

“Wait a minute,” Scott said. “Is he
in
the tree?”

Louise put her hand over her mouth, laughing, as his lower body formed, and we could see his feet bracing him in position in the Y of tree branches. “What the hell kind of message is that supposed to send?” Louise asked. “‘I am a squirrel'?”

“It's kind of cute,” Cassie said. “Makes him seem boyish and playful.”

“Thirty-four, software engineer—of course—never married, no kids, blah, blah, blah,” I said, reading, then
hitting the scroll bar to move past the bare stats to the paragraph Squirrel Boy had written about himself.

“‘Handsome, fit, creative professional seeks an active, petite woman to share wild times and walks on the beach,'” I read, then groaned along with the rest. “Walks on the beach, why do they always talk about walks on the beach? Strolls in the moonlight, candlelit dinners, snuggling in front of the fire. Why can't they show some originality?”

“Don't forget ‘rainy nights,'” Scott said.

“Those are a step above. It takes a slightly finer aesthetic sense to appreciate rain.”

“What does he mean by ‘petite'?” Louise asked. “Does he mean short, or skinny?”

I scrolled back up to the stats. Squirrel Boy was five-eight, one hundred and thirty-five pounds. “I'm guessing both. I don't know many guys who want their date to be bigger than they are.”

“Skinny guys sometimes like plump women,” Scott said. “It's no good having your bones rubbing against hers.”

I frowned at him over my shoulder.